The Twilight Zone, S1E22, "The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street"

Opening: Maple Street, U.S.A., late summer. A tree-lined little world of front porch gliders, barbecues, the laughter of children, and the bell of an ice cream vendor. At the sound of the roar and the flash of light, it will be precisely 6:43 P.M. on Maple Street. … This is Maple Street on a late Saturday afternoon. Maple Street in the last calm and reflective moment –before the monsters came.

This is, of course, a famous Twilight Zone episodes, one of a handful that defines its pop culture legacy. It has suburban Americana interrupted by profound unease, it has intensely felt and barely veiled social concerns, and—of course—it has a twist … one of the best in the series, in fact, even if time and familiarity have probably dulled its effectiveness. We even have the familiar Forbidden Planet flying saucer! Rod Serling wanted to do The Twilight Zone partly because the SFF and horror metaphors would let him tell political stories without the network getting in the way, and this is a superb episode where he does exactly that.

Sure, it’s heavy-handed—but so is any punch to the gut. Also—almost regrettably—it’s as universal as it is particular. You can look at the original airdate—March 4, 1960—and know this parable of frenzied neighborhood suspicion is about McCarthyism, and you can clock specific details in the episode itself, like barb about the monsters as “fifth columnists from the vast beyond,” that tell you the same thing. But paranoia, scapegoating, and the specter of baseless infighting spurred on to keep us all at each other’s throats have never, as Serling notes in his outro, been confined to one time or place. Not to the Twilight Zone, and not to Cold War America.

That’s the strength of a good allegory. Talk about Communists and rabid American senators, and hackles are instantly raised: people know what side they’re already on, and they defend their position. Talk about the core virtues and vices of humanity, and it’s possible that you have a chance.

Often you don’t, no matter how hard you try. I’m sure plenty of pro-McCarthy Americans watched this episode and either never saw any parallels or interpreted themselves as the persecuted party. After all, the whole thing is being stirred up by real monsters from outer space, even if the good people of Maple Street are wrong about the specifics. Doesn’t that mean it’s right to be suspicious and vigilant? They’ll stay on the lookout for Communist sympathizers, thank you very much.

Well, when you write a story, even an openly allegorical one, you don’t get to control how people react to it, as Serling surely knew—and writing a good story means also letting your narrative be a little bigger than whatever point you’re trying to make.

We open with Maple Street and pointedly idyllic music, with the episode giving us just enough normalcy—an ice cream vendor, a man washing his car—before we get the nicely unsettling strobing effect of the “meteor” passing overhead. And there go the lights, phones, and even the cars.

The whole episode is on an accelerated timeline because we have to have Maple Street descend into panicky, murderous chaos over the course of a half-hour, and you may have to suspend your disbelief a little (or a lot) on that front, but the cold equations actually work out pretty well here. Not perfectly—it might be necessary from a plot standpoint for no one but Pete Van Horn to venture over to another street, but it’s also maddening—but okay. This would be eerie. Any given person on their own might shrug, light some candles, and read until the power comes back on, but with a bunch of people all bolstering each other’s fears and suspicions, I buy that things could get fairly bad fairly quickly.

Maple Street also has two other problems. The first is Tommy (Jan Handzlik), a prepubescent comic book expert with an excess of confidence. Quite frankly, I find this kid obnoxious and think any adult who commits violence on behalf of his comic book tropes deserves to be bonked on the head with a shovel, but he has the fervency of a true believer, which works in this kind of situation. Everyone else is confused, but Tommy’s not. Tommy’s sure, which is always an attractive notion. And his explanation has a lot more emotional oomph—and ultimately as much or more accuracy—as Steve’s banal theorizing about sunspots.

Having the answers, however, doesn’t save anyone. Tommy never thought the leopards would eat his face, but Charlie is able to turn the mob’s anxieties—like a questing searchlight—on him nonetheless. When you think about it, isn’t it a little suspicious how Tommy knows all this? Isn’t there something not quite right about this kid? (It’s a moment where they come so close to understanding that their stirred-up fears are the real enemy here, but that epiphany never quite clicks—partly because identifying your own flaws is not nearly as satisfying as identifying an outside enemy.)

Steve (Claude Akins¹) is the other problem with Maple Street. Akins has a thankless role here: the voice of reason who fails to convince, the leader who can’t lead. He’s a lukewarm presence. He has the physical traits of a stalwart genre hero—the square jaw and the deep voice—but he doesn’t have the charisma or the effectiveness. He keeps thinking a calm, rumbling denunciation of all this will solve everything, and it doesn’t. Once all this has gotten started, it’s hard for logic to stop it.

Les (Barry Atwater²), Maple Street’s first scapegoat, has a little more spark. He’s a nervy, angry presence, and his position as a quasi-outsider—the first “exception” to the overall blackout/power-down, the first person to be targeted and, as Steve says, have his idiosyncrasies mercilessly dissected—makes him sympathetic. Since he’s personally taking the brunt of the neighborhood’s paranoia for a while, he has more passion than Steve, and he gets one of the episode’s most emblematic lines: “As God as my witness, you’re letting something begin here that’s a nightmare!” He also has my favorite bizarre bit of side business, where in the midst of everyone glaring at everyone else suspiciously, his wife brings him a glass of milk, so for the next few impassioned moments, Les is just defiantly drinking milk in the background. You do you, Les.

Neighborhood hothead Charlie (Jack Weston³), who has eagerly embraced the notion of being judge, jury, and likely executioner of everyone’s normalcy, is also drinking—but not a hilariously wholesome glass of milk. I like the episode throwing in drunkenness as an accelerant—it doesn’t cause the paranoia, but it fuels it and makes it sloppier and makes its actions more impulsive.

The eventual shotgun plays a similar role. If they didn’t have it, they might have to wait until the “monster” they’re seeing only in silhouette gets close enough for them to see that it’s Pete Van Horn. But they do have it. It’s small town America; when things go to hell, as we see, there’s more than one gun around.

Normalcy, on Maple Street, is ultimately a matter of whether or not the loudest, pushiest people around can identify with you and your interests or not—and it’s also a matter of who speaks up first. Les is a probable monster because sometimes in the middle of the night he stands on his front lawn and looks up at the stars—but the only reason anyone knows this is because someone else admits to waking up in the middle of the night, going outside, and seeing him. Why isn’t she suspicious? Well, because she pointed out someone else to be suspicious of first. She named names. She showed her loyalty to the community by trying to identify the outsider.

Needless to say, Charlie doesn’t stargaze. It’s an intellectual interest, even a vaguely poetic one, so why is Les engaging in it anyway? Why can’t he sleep at night? And why is Steve—who, according to Charlie, should watch who he’s seen talking to—tinkering with his ham radio in the basement? None of them have ever seen this ham radio! Presumably because it isn’t all that interesting! (This leads to my favorite Steve moment, where his wife anxiously offers to go get the ham radio so they can all see it, and Steve puts his foot down: he’s not indulging this bullshit. If they want to go through his house and look at his things, let them get a search warrant. Good for you, Steve.)

This is really an ensemble episode, and Pete Van Horn—who departs early on to duck through the backyard and check on Floral Street’s power—is barely in it, so the episode tags him with the hammer swinging from his carpenter jeans … the sight we see right before Charlie blows him away. I am extremely curious about what went on with Pete throughout this episode. His ongoing absence obviously puts the neighborhood more on edge—though no one ultimately goes to look for him because Tommy has planted the seed that only collaborators are “allowed” to leave the area. If he had come back earlier, Maple Street might not have had the crucial feeling of being scared and alone in the dark. He doesn’t know how bad things are back there, of course—when he left, it was still on the level of “huh, this is weird”—but still, what were you doing all day, Pete? It’s broad daylight at the beginning of the episode and well-past dusk by the end! It is not at all necessary for the story to include an explanation for this, but I’m just amused thinking about Pete sitting happily over on Floral Street, partaking of some other neighborhood’s block party, saying, “This is good barbecue!” while his own street is descending into a mob mentality.

It’s after Pete’s death that things really deteriorate. Les, who can finally lash out at the guy who’s been making him miserable, viciously lays into Charlie and accuses him of being a monster. (There’s no real sense that Les actually believes this, he’s just taking opportunistic revenge, which is kind of a nice touch. You don’t need everyone to buy in for this kind of turmoil to get going—cynicism and justified anger will do just as well.) People throw literal stones at Charlie, despite their own glass houses and not being without sin themselves. Charlie redirects their wrath towards Tommy, a child. It’s all ugly, and then the lights and cars and lawnmowers start turning on and off everywhere, sending people scattering towards each freshly identified enemy. Guns bang, accusations fly. People grab bricks. In a particularly nice touch, someone takes the hammer off poor dead Pete Van Horn.

It’s a good crescendo of unhinged, reactive violence, and director Ronald Winston deserves a lot of credit for making it work, especially since this kind of large-scale ensemble event isn’t actually all that common for the show.

Winston also does a great job with the slow pull-back from Maple Street, a pocket of wild darkness in the middle of a larger landscape—with two alien onlookers on a hotel, orchestrating it all. A few flashing lights, a little confusion, and a pinch of time, the more experienced one says, and then: “All we need to do is sit back and watch. … This world is full of Maple Streets. And we’ll go from one to the other and let them destroy themselves. One to the other. One to the other ….”

I love this ending a lot. In a way, I think the point might be sharper if the power outage and machine stoppage was random—if there had been no malevolent intelligence behind it at all—but if you’re trying to convince people to stay calm and not turn on each other, it probably does help to make them feel like they’re spiting someone in the process. Like I said, Serling knew that Tommy’s aliens were more satisfying than Steve’s sunspots. People are petty, and “that’s just what they want me to do” might really cause a more powerful aversion than “you’ll really have egg on your face later.” I think it’s notable that when the show does do this kind of episode without a master puppeteer—the excellent “The Shelter”—it compensates for that potential loss of effect by bringing the paranoia and agony much closer to home and making the stakes much more identifiable and immediate.

This is a classic for a reason, and on-the-nose or not, the essentials of it still apply and can still make you think. I can point out the ways other people fall into these “Maple Street” traps, sure, but I can also watch this and think about my own tendency to be drawn to compelling or dramatic answers and wonder what would happen if someone tried to play off my fears. This episode has a distinct bull’s-eye, but we all, then and now, live somewhere on the general target anyway. Nobody wants to be Charlie, but it would be easy to be Steve or Les—and it’s not like it ends well for them either.

Closing: The tools of conquest do not necessarily come with bombs and explosions and fallout. There are weapons that are simply thoughts, attitudes, prejudices… to be found only in the minds of men. For the record, prejudices can kill… and suspicion can destroy… and a thoughtless, frightened search for a scapegoat has a fallout all of its own—for the children and the children yet unborn. And the pity of it is that these things cannot be confined to the Twilight Zone.

Directed by: Ronald Winston

Written by: Rod Serling

Up Next: “A World of Difference”

1. Akins had a long career, mostly in supporting roles (we saw him in the AHP episode “A Place of Shadows”). He did quite a few big movies like The Caine Mutiny, Inherit the Wind, The Defiant Ones, etc., but he rarely got the spotlight. ↩︎
2. Surak! Like Akins, he also had a nice long career without really making it big, though his movies were generally smaller-scale. ↩︎
3. A very popular character actor with maybe the best career of our three leads, taking prominent roles in Wait Until Dark, The Four Seasons, A New Leaf, and more. ↩︎